Page:The Columbia River - Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery Its Commerce.djvu/205

Rh Lieutenant Charles Wilkes of the American Navy. The Wilkes expedition was one of the most interesting and important ever undertaken by the United States Government. The squadron consisted of two sloops-of-war, the Peacock and the Vincennes, the store ship, Relief, the brig, Porpoise, and the schooners, Sea Gull and Flying Fish. This fine squadron took up its principal station on Puget Sound, from which extensive surveys were made, one across the mountains to Fort Okanogan; another of the Cowlitz Valley and the Columbia River as far as Wallula.

One of the most important results of this elaborate Wilkes expedition was to establish in the minds of officers of the Government the essential unity of all parts of the Pacific Coast and the boundless opportunities offered to American immigration. Wilkes and his intelligent officers readily grasped, and conveyed through an elaborate report to the government, the idea that Puget Sound was an inherent and integral part of Oregon and that the Columbia Basin was essential to the proper development of American commerce upon the Pacific. They may also have forecast the time when California with her girdles of gold and chaplets of freedom would spring, Athena-like, from the Zeus brain of American enterprise. The control of the River was the key to the control of the entire coast from San Diego to the Straits of Fuca;—and American ownership should have extended to Sitka.

A memorable calamity occurred to the squadron upon its entrance to the River, and that was the loss of the Peacock on the Columbia River bar. The oft-depicted terrors of the River were realised at that time, and yet it was not the River's fault for the Peacock